Miquela is a CGI influencer, and she would like you to buy her crypto art

This week, an artist named Miquela posted a self-portrait on tokenized art marketplace SuperRare. 

In it, the young artist stares placidly at the viewer, blinking while vividly-colored butterflies flap their wings and rest on her head and shoulders. Behind her, an old-fashioned neon-lit sign for a roadside hotel and casino called “Four Aces” glitches, and the message on the sign changes:

“Wen $MIQ? We are all post physical.”

Whatever that means, Miquela is not physical, nor human. She’s a computer-generated influencer.

Still, Miquela’s creator believes that her tokenized art has implications for real people. At the very least, it draws attention to a new way for artists to generate value via decentralized platforms.

He also imagines that it could open the door to a world in which aspects of online celebrity — whether it's real or computer-generated — could be decentralized. 

@lilmiquela

Miquela was created by Brud, a firm that calls itself a digital storytelling business. Brud crafts Miquela’s online presence (her handle on Twitter and Instagram is @lilmiquela) and steers her ventures, which already include forays into modeling and pop music.

Brud was founded by Trevor McFedries, whose own background reflects an intersection between the crypto world and the wider art world. McFedries DJs under the name Yung Skeeter, and once toured with Katy Perry. He co-founded his tech company and invented Miquela in 2016. He also recently invested in the artist-driven crypto marketplace Zora.

McFedries thinks crypto platforms can help artists generate value in a way that centralized social platforms can’t. Social media influencers like Miquela may have a leg-up thanks to their large followings, but he’s also hoping Brud can pave the way for lower-profile creators to do the same.

“Covid has reinforced this pain point that’s forcing creative people to take a real look at the architecture of these industries and the antiquated ways they’re compensated for creating things that bring real people immense joy,” said McFedries.

As part of Miquela’s partnership with SuperRare, she will create exclusive art pieces for the platform. The first, entitled “Rebirth of Venus” has already sparked a bidding war that’s reached 21 ETH, or more than $10,000. Proceeds will go to Black Girls CODE (BGC), an organization devoted to connecting girls from underrepresented communities with coding and computer science programs. 

For McFedries, the project is about more than generating value from a CGI artist. He’s interested in pushing decentralized marketplaces into more areas of society. Value, according to McFedries, is rapidly shifting to the virtual world.

For example, he said, whereas we once wore a new outfit mostly to impress the dozens of people we would come into contact with that day, we now find value in the reactions we get to the outfit online. NFTs might allow people to reap a fiscal return on such virtual value.

Crypto art marketplaces currently generate value by selling ownership of art, but McFedries sees a future in which tokens might also play a role in decentralizing aspects of celebrity itself. Users might vote on the type of content that influencers like Miquela or Kylie Jenner create, for instance, and content creators would be able to easily trade likes and follows for real money.

Into the metaverse

That future is still far on the horizon, at least if NFT adoption is an indicator. While popularity is on the rise, research continues to suggest it’s still a niche marketplace. Volume is still small enough to be gamed, and the most popular platform has a significant wash trading problem. 

Cryptokitties, which burst onto the scene in 2017 and allows users to buy and sell one-of-a-kind cartoon cats using Ethereum, is still the most successful NFT project so far, having generated about $38 million in sales. 

Nonetheless, NFTs continue to be hyped for the role they could play in future games and virtual realities. The next most successful NFT project after Cryptokitties is Decentraland, an Ethereum-based virtual world where users can exchange NFT-based assets.  

When SuperRare announced its partnership with Miquela, SuperRare CEO John Crain said that the project will for the first time let people “interact, engage, and trade artwork with one of the Internet’s biggest CGI influencers.” If it’s a hit, perhaps other CGI influencers will get involved.

Miquela’s peers are mostly other creations of Brud, like @blawko22 or the drama-inciting @bermudaisbae. But similar characters have also emerged elsewhere. @shudu.gram, for instance, is a high fashion CGI model controlled by fashion photographer Cameron-James Wilson.

So besides possibly representing a new avenue for artists to generate value, Miquela's debut on SuperRare might also signal the beginning of a new market in which real people buy real art from virtual people. 

Miquela’s artwork is “one of the most interesting metaverse experiments in the industry,” Crain said.